[slime-devel] Re: structured package names?

[Peter Seibel]

Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa at cs.nyu.edu> writes:

> On Aug 10, 2005, at 3:34 AM, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
>
>> Peter Seibel writes:

>>> FWIW, I put in that feature because I believe in using long, domain
>>> qualified package names (a la Java packages) which means that my
>>> package names are always prefaced with essentially noise. I'd much
>>> rather see:
>>>
>>>   FOO>
>>>
>>> than:
>>>
>>>   COM.GIGAMONKEYS.FOO>
>>>
>>> when *all* my package names start with COM.GIGAMONKEYS. But the flag
>>> is there to turn it off if you don't like (which you probably won't if
>>> you use short package names that happen to contain a dot.)
>>
>> The algorithm should check for the presence of several packages with
>> the same last part, and use more parts in these cases.
>>
>> COM.GIGAMONKEYS.FOO       --->  GIGAMONKEYS.FOO
>> COM.INFORMATIMAGO.FOO           INFORMATIMAGO.FOO
>>
>>
>> UK.CO.SMART-SOFT.FOO      --->  UK.CO.SMART-SOFT.FOO
>> TW.CO.SMART-SOFT.FOO            TW.CO.SMART-SOFT.FOO
>
> Excellent point.  I second that.

FWIW, I'd still like a mode where it just shows the last bit (i.e. the
current behavior). To me the prompt is just a reminder what package
I'm in--it doesn't need to be unambiguous. In practice I'm likely to
either be in CL-USER or a package I defined. I don't really care if
down in the bowels of some library there's *another* package that
happens to have the same last component as mine. But obviously this is
based on how I use packages and my preference for a short, clean
prompt, even at the cost of some slight ambiguity. So if someone adds
this feature, please allow the behavior to continue to be
parameterized to support the two current modes (no contracting and
contracting to last element) as well as whatever new mode you prefer.

> Also, it'd. be nice to either use the shortest nickname

There is some code that tries to fall back on the shortest nickname
though I'm not sure how it currently fits relative to the other
contracting, mostly because I usually don't use package nicknames.

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel           * peter at gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp  * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/